European-Free America?

Spoken like a true Plastic Paddy.

I always find it comical when foreigners are more Irish than the Irish.



Immunity isn't passed down via heredity. In order for immunity to be developed and maintained, there must be a constant source of infection. North America has neither the livestock or population densities to accomplish that.

CalBear warned you for this, but you've been warned about unprovoked rudeness of this kind enough times that you've earned a free week's vacation instead.
 
I think others have discussed this in other threads, but if the natives of the American continents had more epidemic diseases of their own to exchange for smallpox, influenza, etc., the Americas would be much less attractive for European settlement. You could easily end up with a situation where most of the Americas are like parts of tropical Africa and Asia, where the Europeans had relatively small trading outposts, but nobody thought of going there with their family to live permanently. Many Native American societies would still have some severe disruption from European diseases, but they would be more likely to recover without the pressure from European conquest and/or settlement and further waves of disease.

Europeans still might be able to settle in significant numbers in more temperate regions where the native population was less dense, but even there it might be more like OTL South Africa than the USA or Canada.
 
Taken as you just stated, it's a statement too vague to mean much of anything.

It'd be pretty hard to hate paganism more than the Christians did in practice. Christianity's record on "convert or die" is not pretty.

And Islamic (religious) attitudes) on slavery are considerably superior to Christianity's.

I'm not saying Muslim rule would be inevitably uniformly better, but a lot of the things that were done that we find appalling would be hard to exceed simply by changing the religion of the Eurasians doing the colonizing.
Yeah, I can't really see a realistic way for the Muslims to be harsher on pagans than the people who went around burning them alive for not immediately recanting their old ways.
 
Yeah, I can't really see a realistic way for the Muslims to be harsher on pagans than the people who went around burning them alive for not immediately recanting their old ways.

Oh, in life, things can ALWAYS worsen, its something you learn quick...

The thing of the House of Islam VS House of Infidels(?) could get things even worse. In theory. Specially if tales of supposed cannibalism in some peoples had a truth...
 
Oh, in life, things can ALWAYS worsen, its something you learn quick...

The thing of the House of Islam VS House of Infidels(?) could get things even worse. In theory. Specially if tales of supposed cannibalism in some peoples had a truth...

And why are Muslims going to react to that worse than Christians, again?
 
The tennants of the religions. It's unPC to say, but Islam is even more direct and proactions.

I don't know Arabic so I don't know the specific tenets, but judging by actual practice of Christianity, I'm very suspicious that it's true that Muslims are going to be more hostile than the Spanish were OTL. That would take a considerable amount of doing.
 
Immunity isn't passed down via heredity. In order for immunity to be developed and maintained, there must be a constant source of infection. North America has neither the livestock or population densities to accomplish that.

Well then, let's develop this idea further. They've recently unearthed some evidence that perhaps the Tartessians (and by extension the Phoenicians) both knew of and visited North America. Say this develops into a trade route (I'm going to call it the Ivory road, seeing as ivory from Walrus tusks would be an early important commodity. Later it can be the Fur Road) that leads to a length period of contact between native americans and Europeans, although the Europeans mostly fail to settle, or do much more then establish trade. If we use this as a catalyst for further developing trade routes among the native americans, and we start the exchange of ideas among their civilizations, we get a) much faster technological development and b) exposure to disease as necessary to develop immunities.

As for your other points, there are some aspects of immunity that are inheritable. I'm not going to go into it at length, but basically the natives were genetically predisposed to falling victim to European diseases. Their closest genetic relatives, the Siberians, also lost around 75% of their population each time Smallpox rolled around, and it effectively brought down their civilizations. A constant exposure to disease, over time, could remove this; today, only 1/3rd of native Americans share the characteristics in their immune system that made their ancestors more susceptible to Eurasian plagues.
Also, there is considerable evidence that Mesoamerica, the Missisipi, Peru and even the Amazonian basin had huge population density- perhaps being even more population dense than parts of Europe. Recent estimates are that 1/5th of the worlds population was living in the Americas prior to Columbus.

(PS: I was born and lived the first 16 years of my life in Galway. :rolleyes:)
 
*headdesk*

Tartessians now? What next in the long litany of obscure civilizations from antiquity supposed to have visited the Americas? Samnites? Belgae? I've not heard anything about this supposed evidence of Tartessian contact with the New World and I think it'd have been pretty big news if it was true. And the idea of Phoenician contact has always been loopy and calling evidence of it being tenuous would be far too generous, the idea was based "evidence" of the most preposterous kinds.
 
*headdesk*

I agree with 9 Fanged Hummingbird. Earliest major contact with Eurasia outside of hunter-gatherers crossing and re-crossing the Bering Straights is the Norse around 1000 AD. Anything earlier than that does not have concrete proof or even very strong evidence.*



*IMHO Polynesian contact has some very strong evidence, but as of yet not 100% proof.
 
I agree with 9 Fanged Hummingbird. Earliest major contact with Eurasia outside of hunter-gatherers crossing and re-crossing the Bering Straights is the Norse around 1000 AD. Anything earlier than that does not have concrete proof or even very strong evidence.*



*IMHO Polynesian contact has some very strong evidence, but as of yet not 100% proof.
Actually the fact that Polynesians use American gourds and yams is a clear indication that they reached the Americas. (Genetic studies confirm that the Polynesian gourds are American.) The only good evidence on the American side is that chicken, and while I accept it, I gather there's only the one site been found.

I don't see how anyone can doubt (possibly a single) Polynesian contact.
 
Actually the fact that Polynesians use American gourds and yams is a clear indication that they reached the Americas. (Genetic studies confirm that the Polynesian gourds are American.) The only good evidence on the American side is that chicken, and while I accept it, I gather there's only the one site been found.

I don't see how anyone can doubt (possibly a single) Polynesian contact.

Eh, it is possible that the sweet potato reached Polynesia through drift voyage from the Americas. It's possible for boats to be swept into Polynesia from the Americas for extremely long distances. Of course, sweet potatoes accidentally getting to Polynesia doesn't explain the linguistic similarities in Native American and Polynesian words for sweet potatoes, but sustained contact necessary for that kind of linguistic exchange seems odd given the lack of Asian plants in the Americas pre-Columbian Americas. It's all very strange.

As for the chicken site, the reason I'm not 100% convinced is because of the lack of redundancy. Two sites with chickens which both carbon date to the pre-Columbian era would convince me, and given the 400 year difference between the first appearance of sweet potatoes in Polynesia and these chickens in South America, expecting more widespread chickens in the Andes is reasonable.
 
Timely thread - can anybody point me to some off-site references on the nations of the Wabanaki Confederacy? I'm looking for on culture, day-to-day life, politics, and technological developments (specifically, weapons, seafaring, and navigation).
 
Timely thread - can anybody point me to some off-site references on the nations of the Wabanaki Confederacy? I'm looking for on culture, day-to-day life, politics, and technological developments (specifically, weapons, seafaring, and navigation).
Hmm, I'm not immediately good with politics and technology, but I know a fair bit about Wabanaki myths, culture, and a little about history. It is the local history after all, so it's of some relevance to me. :p Here are some relevant links: Abenaki history, native technology, and a book about a local Abenaki chief. This was just a very cursory search, I'll see if I can turn up more and answer any questions you might have.
 
Personally I doubt it would be possible to stop any contact with the Americas before they develop to an extent that they wouldn't be threatened by Europeans/Japanese/Arabs/whoever the hell else, but it would be possible to keep them isolated for a few more decades, hopefully allowing the emergence of a stronger, more advanced and more stable Pan-Meso-American cultural grouping, encompassing the Taino.

This would most likely be via some butterflying keeping the centre of European power in the east, in Austria-Hungary and Bohemia's area. This would reduce the seafaring tradition, and Spain, Portugal, France and Britain wouldn't be able to fund all these naval expeditions. They might well be pushed back further by the Muslims in the West due to this reduced power. Nevertheless, the trade route problem would still be a big deal, so unless they trade through Slavic lands in OTL Russia, then they're gonna have to deal with the Muslims. But whatever happens, Europe's gaze stays fixed inwards.

Eventually, either the Muslims or the Europeans, in some mad venture, perhaps still looking for trade routes, would reach the Americas. Or, depending how long we leave it, maybe a West African megacultural region or something like that would do it. But someone in western Afro-Eurasia would get there, and then you're on your way. I don't see it happening with the Asians, although Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese naval missions going up north to the Chukchis and so on for whatever reason might discover Alaska, and if they begin trading there, or get swept off course enough, they might realise that this is an entirely new land.

Hopefully by this point Mesoamerica will be more developed, and a few states will survive in some form, to declare independence from the colonial empires later with indigenous majorities and native cultures, comparable to the OTL Morocco/Tunisia situation.
 
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